What will become of my film negatives when I'm gone?

Lately I have been reorganizing my old negatives into new binders. I'm adding new pages of negatives to binders every month too. I can't help but to think about what's going to happen to them when I'm gone.

I'm not a famous photographer, and I probably never will be. I'm ok with that, but I am certainly attached to my old film.

I don't have kids or much family left to give a damn about my work, so what's the use?Perhaps I should pull a Brett Weston and just set them ablaze on my 80th birthday.

Like you, I have hundreds of feet of Tri-X negatives - mostly shot in the 1960s->1980s, a fair number shot underwater, that I keep for some reason, although I know of no one who is interested in them in the slightest.

Maybe a bonfire is a good idea after one last persual to see if I missed one that deserved to be scanned digitally back at the turn of the century, when I originally converted most of my film images to scans of some sort. I'll have to consider this again.

I inherited a huge trunk of negatives, prints, 16mm film, newspaper clippings and letters from my grandfather. I simply sent it away to ScanDigital in maybe 5 different shipments and got CDs back. I spent a fair amount of time organizing them into galleries on SmugMug and have been surprised over the years how many people enjoyed them, extended family I didn't even know we had.

Now I've uploaded them all to Google Photos because the facial recognition is amazing and I can search for photos by faces. I refer back to them a lot more than I ever thought I would.

We weren't really a picture family, I have a few fro my parents, who are gone now. Oddly, I didn't really take a lot of family pictures myself.. I do most of my own scanning. There is something great about old family pictures.

Okay, that's just crazy! I can't imagine the emotions that go on when you do that.

The most heartbreaking story I've ever heard is when Jaques Lowe, the photographer with 40,000 negatives of the Kennedys, the man who helped create the Kennedy legend, decided he had to preserve his life's work in the safest vault on earth. So he chose the vault of JP Morgan, underground, impregnable, climate-controlled, in a safe no one could get inside.

6 months after he died, two planes flew into the World Trade Center where the vault was, and his life's work was turned to ash.

His daughter did everything possible to restore them, but it wasn't possible because they were ash. However, she found contact sheets in another location and years later was able to restore 1500 amazing images.

I’ve never given it much thought either. I do think that you should at minimum scan your negatives and at best print and sign your very best. Who knows how many gems you have there. Your post reminds me of that Vivian Maier story. I would hope you’d reconsider talking a torch to all those beautiful moments 🙏🏿📸